Do you realise what you just did? You just bet against the American economy.

(SPOILERS, if you've been seclusion for the past decade) Adam
McKay’s adaptation of Michael Lewis’ 2010 book The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine is fuelled as much by
admiration as indignation. Not for what this collection of speculators achieved
(triggering the 2007 financial crisis, from whence nothing will e’er be the
same again, no matter how hard we try to kid ourselves), but for their
perceptiveness and acumen. The movie inhabits similar territory to the ruinous
financial tomfoolery we saw in The Wolf
of Wall Street – highlighting the absence of any semblance of a moral or
ethical component within capitalism – albeit it is demonstrably more forward in
leading its audience by the nose. But that’s okay, nay essential; it needs to
be in order to explain itself. The Big
Short takes an unashamedly accessible approach to exposing the seemingly
impenetrable underpinnings of the sub-prime crisis and, through the closest
thing a movie of if-not-villains-then-questionably-motivated-hucksters has to
an arbiter of what went down (Steve Carrell’s incendiary hedge fund manager
Mark Baum), expresses acute outrage amid the prevailing mirth of disbelief.

The Big Short fits into that cross-pollinated genre in
latter years identified as dramedy, although simply labelling it a straight-up
satire might be more helpful. McKay (Anchorman,
The Other Guys, which also got stuck
into the instigators of the financial crisis, specifically the looting of
pension funds; in a sobering end credits animation, it explains Ponzi schemes
and furnishes figures for the costs of the crisis on average Joes) is a natural
for going broad, what with his “outrageous
mind” and all, so this doesn’t have the same deftness and craftsmanship Scorsese
brought to Wolf. But then, if a
subject deserved a sledgehammer, it’s this one. Even given that supporting
player Brad Pitt had taken another Lewis book that was on the face of it
unlikely movie material, Moneyball, to
significant success (Pitt co-produced both), McKay, adapting with Charles
Randolph, only got the go-ahead from Paramount on condition he made Anchorman 2.

Average Joes
are barely in evidence in The Big Short.
Aside from quick-cut montages, their representative is a dutiful tenant (compounding
the injustice of losing his home, his daughter has only just started school;
those McKay broad strokes) whose landlord has been failing his repayments. Attempts
to emphasise the other side amid the self-involved excitement of the main
characters’ gold rush fever is also in evidence when Brad Pitt’s Ben Rickert cuts
his young protégées off during their celebrations and chides them to ponder the
ramifications of what they have just done. Mainly, though, McKay shrewdly
avoids wallowing in the misery the rich getting richer has fostered, simply because
he wants people to actually go see his movie. And Carrell’s blistering,
apoplectically indignant Baum channels the main message without bringing
everyone down, man. Better to reach an audience through anger and laughter than
turn them off with despair.

As such, McKay
surely looked to his predecessors when planning the picture; Arbitrage took the point of view of a hedge
fund manager in dire straits, but limped too far of course into a (not
especially involving) personal drama, while Wall
Street: Money Never Sleeps was symptomatic of pensioner Oliver Stone’s more
recent career; it lacked bite. Margin
Call was highly accomplished, heroically making similar efforts to McKay in
communicating just what went awry so as to bring down a namesake of Lehman
Brothers and Bear Stearns, but not very many people saw it. And it was also an
interior piece, told from the point of view of those within the institution;
McKay, with his band of nominal outsiders (through ethos, attitude or
anti-social personality) takes on the entire financial apparatus. These guys
aren’t the good guys (someone might argue the mere act of exposing the corrupt
system is heroic, which rather avoids that they are still working within its
environs, making – huge amounts of – money), but their eyes are sufficiently
open to recognise the truth of the situation before it hits them and everyone
else in the face.

Baum’s glum
conclusion, following mystification over why no one wanted to do anything about
the ticking time bomb, and speculation over whether the activities were
knowingly fraudulent or the consequence of straight-up ineptitude, is that the
institutions did nothing, when it came down to it, because they knew they’d be
bailed out; they simply didn’t care. In an obvious, but no less acute for it, closing
statement, Ryan Gosling’s narrator (unscrupulous trader Jared Vennett) informs
us how, in the aftermath, hundreds of bankers were sent to prison and the big banks
were broken up…

Except they weren’t, only one fall guy went to prison, the poor
and immigrants were blamed for all society’s woes (as they always are), and the
salaries of those officiating over the mess continued to spiral upwards. Appointing
itself harbinger of the inevitable in a system no one flushed out, the film warns
that similarly tranched CDOs (collateralised debt obligations) were being sold once
more by the summer of 2015. Flash forward to current warnings of a return
plunge to the depths of the 2008 crisis are terrorising the headlines, while
the future of Deutsche in particular (front and centre in the picture, where
Vennett is an employee) is in doubt.

Some have
asserted it’s unconscionable that the picture makes its protagonists out to be
heroes, but one would have to be very literal minded to see them that way. The
picture uses the “hero’s journey” as a tool to make the material relatable. Its
cleverness is that these are guys doing “bad things” (to the economy, certainly)
yet you’re put in the empathic position of wanting to see the underdogs
succeed; it’s irresistible, and a very shrewd push-pull. It may be that The Big Short’s presentation of them as
the lone voices is overstated, overemphasising the narrative that no one else
could/did see it coming, and it’s certainly the case that stability of the
mortgage market wasn’t merely assumed by those within it in the way it is painted
here, but it’s an entirely understandable storytelling device.

The closest
The Big Short gets to actual
veneration is with Baum’s handwringing (and emotive, but rather facile and extraneous,
backstory concerning his suicidal brother) over the crisis. But he’s the one who, on witnessing first hand the flagrant ambivalence towards what is
occurring, demands “Short everything that
man has touched”. He also ultimately gives the go ahead to proceed with the
credit default swaps (in the name of fiduciary responsibility) on hearing a
bailout is to be granted, so directly linking the shorts’ billions to tax payer
money. One can’t really ascribe Baum (based on Steve Eisman) moral high ground,
any more than Pitt’s disarmingly conspiratorial Rickert (based on Ben Hocket),
a former JP Morgan trader with his eyes wide open about the system, who, when
asked why he did this for his fledgling investors, replies “You wanted to be rich”.

Yves Smith in particular takes issue with Lewis’ portrayal of events, asserting that the
action of the shorts drove demand to the very worst mortgages, thus making the
sub-prime crisis ten times worse than it would have been otherwise (she also
accuses Lewis, and by implication McKay, of paying insufficient attention to the
other side of the CDO equation; who the buyers of the bonds were).

There may
be something to this, and certainly the pace of developments at the backend of
the picture isn’t as measured and easily digestible as the early stages. There,
we have Margot Robbie in a bath explaining subprime loans. Some of these
layman’s interludes are less helpful than others, however. I found Anthony
Bourdain’s analogy of fish stew to CDOs rather obscured matters (essentially poor
performing CDOs are repackaged, and repackaged again, and garlanded with AAA
ratings), although Selena Gomez and Richard Thaler on synthetic CDOs were clear
enough. McKay gets his ideas across through employing something of the pop
sensibility Michael Moore has utilised to great effect in his documentaries.
Sometimes the seams show (I was gratified to discover the “Truth is like poetry. And most people fucking hate poetry” line was
made up by the director, as it reeked of an invented aphorism), but mostly
McKay hits his target.

He’s strong
both on the idiocy that was the foundation of the crisis (the jock-ish vacuity
of mortgage brokers doing their very best to give loans to the most unsuitable
property purchasers) and the collusion that allowed the deceit to sustain itself,
be it Melissa Leo’s Standard & Poors rep (deciding ratings in order to
maintain good relations with the banks), or massaged media (greenhorn investors
Geller John Magaro and Shipley Finn Wittrock attempt to tell their story to a New
York Times journalist, but he doesn’t want to make waves with his Wall Street contacts,
and besides, he has a family to support).

McKay also wrings
fine performances from his cast. Carrell in particular is a whirlwind of
splenetic fury, and Bale is customarily transformative as the heavy-metal
loving, aspergic, monocular Michael Burry, who saw the potential of it all and
rung profits of 489% before closing his fund. Gosling brings obnoxious swagger,
while Rafe Spall confoundingly essays a nice guy for a change. Lesser known
actors Magaro, Wittrock, and Jeremy Strong (as one of the forthright analysts at Baum’s FrontPoint)
flesh out the ensemble, while Byron Mann is magnificently vile, gleefully detailing
his culpability to Baum before asking what he earns.

Geller
pronounces, on the phone to his parents, “It’s
the end of capitalism!” although his pronouncement may have come a little
soon (but maybe only a little). Certainly, some of those involved don’t, in
contrast to McKay’s foreboding closing summary, believe the same thing will
happen again (Burry is not among them). Lewis is somewhere in between; while he
doesn’t foresee an identical crisis in the near future, he believes the changes
necessary to safeguard the system were not implemented (“I think they should have broken up the banks”). Why that didn’t
happen is probably more about who really has the power, rather than the one
Lewis suggests.

Even given
McKay pulling out all the stops to make this populist fare, The Big Short’s success has been modest.
It may get a modest boost if it wins Best Picture Oscar, but public interest in
subject matter they’d rather not have to think about can only be so
attractively packaged. Now, if the film had been able to serve scalps, rather
than focus on a situation with no clear end in sight, it might have had had a
chance to reach a viewership on All the
President’s Men levels. Not that The
Big Short comes close to that pinnacle of quality, but so few do.

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